I just got some (personally) mindblowing advice, re: a message that felt overdue:
You don't have to explain yourself.
Say, '"Thanks for your patience; it took longer than I expected to get back to you."
and then move on with it!
🤯
“If I have a difficult thing to understand, if there’s something I think is not going to be that easy to get, I try to say it in three different ways. I think if you come in from different angles you have a better chance of getting a three-dimensional view of this difficult idea.”
my sense is that people who take a long time to respond to messages, or tend to go into shame spirals about them, often put a lot of pressure on themselves to respond in a specific way